They may not
release an avalanche of software but there's no denying
that any Thalion game you pick up today is going to be
hot, hot, hot, as Robert Smith once said. Simon Byron
took one of those Seacat things across the Channel and
chatted to the chaps who make the German software house
tick.

Who? Just who are these
two geezers, then? Where did they come from? Here's all
you need to know...

Christian Jungen
is 27, 1.9 metres tall, 87 kg with brown curly
hair. Influenced by Pong, Chris bought a C64 and
started programming in Basic "like everybody
did" and, having bought Elite, became
fascinated with 3D programming. He studied
computer science at the ETH Zürich, but half a
year into his course he decided that studying
computer science wasn't as thrilling as
programming 3D for games. After programming his
first 3D kernel he joined up with Thalion.

Softography:

No Second
Prize (programming and game design)

Airbus A320
(ST conversion)

Erik Simon is 29
years old, 2 metres tall, bald and bearded.
Although he was born in Hamburg, he grew up in
the Pfalz, a German wine cultivation area, before
moving to Gütersloh four years ago. At school he
began studying communication engineering up until
he was called up for National Service after which
he co-founded Thalion. Since then Erik's been
haunting programmers and graphic artists as
'chief' of the development department.

Softography:

Dragonflight
(graphics and game design)

Wings of
Death (graphics)

Amberstar
(some graphics and production)

Trex Warrior
(graphics and game design)

Thalion was founded in
October 1988 by Holger Flöttmann, Udo Fischer and Erik
Simon, of which only Erik is still with the company
today. Their first in-house project was Dragonflight,
which began as Udo and Erik's private project a year
before but was only finished after one and a half years
of full-time development.

Since those humble beginnings
they've released loads of products and many staff have
come and gone. One thing which hasn't changed, though, is
the company ideal: To push every machine they've written
on to the very limits. No-one involved has become
immensely rich or drives a Porsche but, as Erik Simon
puts it, "at least we can look back at all of our
games with the feeling that we gave our very best".

I spoke to Erik Simon and
Christian Jungen about their
personal hopes, their fears and, yes, their tears.

You've just started work on No Second Prize 2,
can you tell us anything about it at this early stage?

We're hoping to make it far more
realistic than the original No Second Prize. You'll be
able to ride in the slipstream of the other bikes and
that will obviously affect your speed, just like in real
life. The computer-controlled opponents will behave more
intelligently and we're hoping to include some strong
personalities - some riders will be notoriously
aggressive whilst others will be known for being a
tactical racers, that sort of thing.

Visually, we're going to make
the game a lot more complicated and detailed so the race
tracks will look as true to life as possible. We're
thinking about implementing a four player link using a
split screen and/ or a modem link. Just like in the
original No Second Prize, the sequel's 3D system will
give an intense feeling of speed. Where other 3D games
create a large distance between player and the simulated
environment because of the slow screen update, NSP 2
really makes the player a part of the virtual world.
Right now I'm still working on the 3D system for Airbus 2
but after that work on NSP 2 will begin in earnest.

I think Christian has covered it
all, really. Everything is still at an early stage, so
what we've said isn't definite. One thing's for sure,
we'll have to do loads of research to get the tracks
completely realistic. We're aware that everything should
look exactly as it does in real life without losing what
made the original game so successful, i.e. the speed.
Lots of options and competition modes would be nice, and
I'm personally looking forward for the possibility of
linking machines together and splitting the screen. I'm
anxious to see how Chris will manage splitting the screen
without losing too much speed as it will require twice
the CPU time for 3D calculations.

Surely the A1200 would
be able to manage it quite well. How have you found the
machine so far?

I can't call the A1200 a
complete success. The 256-colour mode is an improvement
theoretically speaking, but the blitter is not any faster
than the one in the normal Amiga 500 and the amount of
data which has to be shifted around has doubled. The
screen memory could have been better organized, by giving
each pixel one byte, a bit like VGA on the PC, or two
bytes like the Falcon in true-colour mode. That's why the
A1200 isn't really the ideal machine for polygon graphics
or new techniques like Gouraud-shading or texture
mapping. However, the processor speed is good, especially
when you consider the price.

I don't want to sound greedy but
I wish the improvements on the A1200 were a bit more
substantial. There are some impressive technical details,
but they aren't enough to make your head explode. A
word-per-pixel realcolour mode like the Atari Falcon
would have been ideal to whiz around with really amazing
3D stuff. There are more of these little details which
spoil the A1200 a little bit.

But what the heck, I don't have
to program the machine and from a game designer's point
of view, I personally would love to do a special project
for the A1200 only. Alas, we've got problems enough with
our high development costs as it is so I fear we can't
support the A1200 as much as we'd like to.

There are simply not enough
people buying software for all Amiga formats, let alone
the A1200 only. Nevertheless, we will try to do what we
can. Ambermoon, for example, will feature special
routines for the A1200 and turbo-board owners to speed up
the texture-mapped dungeons and the option to display
textures on the floor and ceilings.

Like other companies, we're
forced to move more and more onto the PC. On the other
hand, this gives us the opportunity to make use of the
enhanced graphic features of the A1200 in the future
because we can port over the VGA 256-colour graphics
instead of drawing them from scratch for the A1200
version.

So you'll continue
supporting the A500, then?

Of course, the Amiga is still an
attractive market!

Yes, we'll try and release as
much stuff as possible. It's probable that most of our
games will be 1 MB only, though. We'll try to make our
future projects play as smoothly as possible but a cheap
harddisk or at least a second disk drive would be very
handy. We're trying to match the quality of the big names
in RPGs with Ambermoon, for example, and despite
intensive packing methods we still don't know if we're
going to use 6 or 7 or even more disks when the final
version is released.

If you were Mr
Commodore, where would you take the Amiga from here?

The software should go more in
the direction of sophisticated simulations because this
type of game has hardly been touched by consoles. The
hardware should be improved to make these kind of games
possible...

...Yes, the perfect Amiga would
be one which is technically so advanced that it is able
to create the fascination there was a long time ago when
all the C64 owners switched to the Amiga. I know this is
a very difficult task, especially at a reasonable price
point, but this fascination is the only thing to motivate
large groups of people to buy a new machine and perhaps
forget about their cheap 50 MHz 486s.

You
haven't mentioned CDs. Do you think that the supposed CD
revolution ever take off?

I've got mixed feelings about this. On
one hand, the capacity of CD-ROM opens a whole new world
for gamers and game-designers but on the other I don't
think it pushes the standards of entertaining software
forward beyond playing minutes and minutes of raytraced
or digitised picture sequences. Okay, at first it's
impressive, yes, but what you've got in the end is a
low-quality, short version of something you could have
rented from your local video store for a few quid.

The massive amount of data on a
CD should be used to make games that are incredibly deep
and atmospheric. Imagine having a whole fantasy world
with thousands of different creatures. A world so vast
that you can get lost exploring it, just like in real
life. As far as I can see, there's only one problem:
Nobody can afford to produce CD-based software that
really uses the medium for things in ways other than
sound and graphics. Obviously things will improve as CDs
become more commonplace, which they appear to be doing.

And I'd like to say that
there'll be no revolution until the CD hardware
incorporates fast decompressing chips (JPEG, MPEG, etc)
which allows the host computer to receive large amounts
of data in a very short space of time. It's all very well
having a storage medium which can hold vast amounts of
data but if you can't use it fast enough then it ruins
the machine's potential.

In what ways would you
say the German Amiga market differs from the British?

If you want to get rich quickly
in the German games market you'll have to write either a
football management game or an economics simulation. Our
problem is that we find them dead boring so I guess we'll
have to stick to racing and flight simulations and huge
role-playing games. Both of these genres are generally
well accepted by most German games players. Action games
are almost a stillbirth, although Lionheart did fairly
well for a short time here.

This doesn't mean that no German
players buy action games, just that it's less than in
Britain.

What about piracy in
Germany?

It's constantly pushing us
towards the PC, it's that bad. Although I love playing
and designing action games like Lionheart, from a
personal point of view I'm also interested in complex
RPGs and more involved games like that so if we did have
to totally move across to the PC, it wouldn't be too much
of a personal problem. That said, though, I do love the
Amiga and it would be a shame to be forced away from it
as some of the action games the Amiga is renowned for are
truly excellent. Maybe there's still hope for it with the
A1200 and future Amiga models and, as I've said before,
we'll continue to support the Amiga for as long as
possible.

It's odd when you consider that
there's hardly a country with a larger pirate scene than
Germany, yet it's the country with the toughest laws.

So how is Thalion trying
to combat piracy?

By making more complex games
with more extensive manuals. Nowadays copy protection and
legal procedures are useless.

That's right, we didn't even
bother protecting Lionheart because there's no point in
simply delaying the pirates from cracking the games and
sticking them on bulletin boards. If the Amiga users
don't change their way of thinking about pirating games,
the machine will disappear from the market. We're trying
to offer a fair amount of quality and we don't copy
protect our games because we don't want to punish honest
customers with funny protection methods. Copy protection
won't change people's minds.

Why do hackers spend so
much time cracking copy protection?

I can understand why people get
a buzz out of cracking but to be honest I don't think
that the crackers are the real problem, especially with
the on-disk copy protection being gradually reduced. And
I'm not entirely convinced that swapping a few pirate
copies in the schoolyard is a huge problem. Obviously it
damages sales but the real pain in the what's-it-called
are the people who are professionally distributing pirate
copies as a large scale business.

I disagree. Pirates are people
who satisfy their basic instincts. They experience
gratification when they are able to cause software
companies financial damage with relatively little effort.

Will piracy ever be
wiped out?

Certainly not. There is piracy
on all formats, including PC and even consoles. But on
these machines it hasn't surpassed the point yet where
it's getting dangerous to invest a lot of money in
expensive projects.

And anyway, has the drug problem
ever been solved?

On that sombre note I
bid you farewell and wish you success with your future
projects.

Thalion: The Story so
far
This might be all well and good, but what have Thalion
actually done? Over, once again, to Erik

Dragonflight"Our
first RPG which took us three years to finish.
For the standards of that time, it was a massive
game with both 2D and 3D sections. It began its
history as the hobby of two (2!) people - what a
good way to show how naive we were! If it had
been published one or two years earlier, it would
have caused quite a sensation; but when it came
out it was 'only' an up-to-date RPG."

No
Second Prize"Another
project which took us a long time but we think it
was well worth the effort. Show us a faster
vector-graphics racing game on the Amiga and
you'll receive a giant cask of German beer."

Lionheart"Technically,
we tried to do with the Amiga what we did with
the ST years ago (that is, to kick butt). In
terms of playability it hopefully shows that we
are now experienced games designers. And when it
comes to graphics and size, all there is to say
is that we barely managed to cram it onto four
disks."

Trex
Warrior
"In our opinion, this is a highly-underrated
3D vector-graphics shoot-'em-up. Despite the fast
3D, we put lots of effort into the playability
area."

Airbus
A320
"Our product with the highest sales figures.
Programmed by Rainer Bopf, a German Luftwaffe
officer, its main fascination is the extreme
realism of the flight physics."

Amberstar
"Our second RPG. It didn't concentrate too
much on flashy graphics but its depth, complexity
and weeks of adventure still haven't been put to
shame even by current RPGs."